


Five Stages of Grief for What You Lost

by Looks_Clear (chrysalisdreams)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Chuck Shurley is God, Gen, I don't accept the MCD but I tag for it, Not A Fix-It, Post-Episode: s15e19 Inherit the Earth, Rated T for F, Spoilers for Episode: s15e19 Inherit the Earth, Spoilers for Episode: s15e20 Carry On, Story within a Story, it would hurt me not to include the destiel tag but don't look for quality here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:15:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27721283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrysalisdreams/pseuds/Looks_Clear
Summary: Chuck is still God even if he isn’t God anymore, he thinks to himself. He owns the characters, he owns the right to their story. Chuck sits on a beach by a blue inlet of water, surrounded by green trees and nature, and seeths.There is a blank book in his lap. A tome, really, a thick fat book. A blank journal — why not? Maybe he’ll get back to writing.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Kudos: 9





	Five Stages of Grief for What You Lost

**Author's Note:**

> Can't write Fix-Its right now. Too angry. Must write bad endings only.

ACCEPTANCE

Sure, why not. Why not live as a human. Humanity sucks, but he’s done it before, in fact he’s done it a few times over and had pretty good lives. Of course it always was a little like the song “Common People” — Shatner did such a great cover of that song, so much style — in that he could stop it all in an instance with power he was pretending, at the time, that he didn’t have.

That is his reality, now: no power, for real. The sticks and gravel poking at his ass are uncomfortable (life ahead is going to be a lot of uncomfortable physical things) so he hops up to his feet. He dusts off his slacks and straightens his clothes and looks around. There’s a road. He will walk to the nearest house; it can’t be far.

So what if there are no people. So what if he is alone, the Winchesters are in the same situation, all alone on an empty Earth. People sucked anyway. Humans had been a big mistake, and he had gotten rid of them, fixed that mistake, so what if he doesn’t have any God power. He doesn’t need it now. He’s good.

And isn’t his death book just the most badass thing? Chuck picks up the tome, appreciating the shape and heft. It has a grand weight. He pages through it. A sniff at the blank leaves and they smell vaguely of old ink. Congratulating himself for being clever, he plucks a thin twig he finds on the ground and uses it to hold the pages open, and for extra measure against the book sealing to human hands, he bends down the corners of a few pages.

The binding is beautifully hand sewn and tight. The cover is a supple leather, elegantly tanned and worked with the Greek letters alpha and omega.

_ “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.” _

Chuck smiles with satisfaction. Tucking the book under his arm, he starts walking down the dirt road.

DEPRESSION

He’s sick of walking and the road just keeps winding through trees and nothing. He has already stooped to drinking unfiltered water, almost falling into the trickling stream that was probably full of Giardia. He feels light-headed and hungry.

It’s sinking in. It’s over. It’s really over.

Chuck gross cries for about half a mile. The snot drips out of his nose and his sobs sound small in the cool afternoon. The wind is louder. He hates nature. He hates  _ Nature _ , all those versions of it, Demeter and Osanyin and Pachamama, Ninsar, Ameretat, Freyja, and Tāne.

Chuck kicks a rock in the road.

He wipes his messy face on the back of his sleeve. Now he has a headache and he is thirstier. He thinks about lying down where he is, there on the sun-heated asphalt road. He stops walking.

Why?

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

“WHAT THE FUCK!?!” he yells suddenly, at the sky, at the world. At himself, truth be told. He should have seen it coming. He should have… protected himself, not let himself get so  _ emotionally invested _ in the damn Winchester story! They had let him down so many times, but he kept coming back. He kept having… hope. He believed that there was only one direction the story could go, yes with some variation in the actual ending, but there was a narrative logic, God dammit!

Chuck screams incoherently, as loud as his lungs will allow. For half a second he feels marginally better. Then it is back, that impotence. He can’t change what has happened. It happened and it will never be different from what it is.

It’s disgusting and he hates it.

He has two choices: keep walking, as if he believes he can get somewhere else than where he is, or just… stop.

He collapses onto the road. He flops onto his back, the thick death book tumbling aside. It lies open to the sky, whatever meaning it once had opaque.

He lies there, waiting to crumble to dust and sink into the earth. A weak sob wobbles in his gut and ejects from his throat.

There is a vibration in the road. A car is coming.

BARGAINING

“Oh shit. God! Are you OK?”

Chuck startles at being called God. It takes him a full minute of the young woman standing over him to register that she wasn’t calling him God. There are two other women with her, all about the same age. College girls, maybe. A chubby bottle red-head, a tall and thin doe-eyed woman with deep brown skin tone, a long-haired woman picking at the patch pocket of her dress.

It dawns on him that all the humans he raptured away, Jack — that thief — has put back.

One of them, stretching her slim, bare arm from cautious distance, hands Chuck a bottle of water.

“Are you hurt?” the first one asks.

There was a time when he would have known their names, their intentions, how they met, who they were, everything about these three women without any effort on his part. Instead, he is lying there on the road, ahead of where these Good Samaritans have stopped their Silverado pickup truck. At the mercy of strangers’ kindness.

“Kind of,” he says. “Yeah. I’m hurt.” It’s true. He hurts.

The women make faces of concern. They exchange looks. Chuck takes the water, sits up, and the woman offering smiles encouragement and relief.

The woman who hasn’t spoken until now asks, in a wary voice, “Can we help?”

“I need a ride?” Chuck says. The women exchange looks again and he can tell this time that he is losing them. Their body language changes; they each shift their weight back as if to move away. “Wait,” Chuck pleads. He turns on the charm. “I really need help. I’m lost. Please.” The  _ please _ comes out with real pain, and tears well in his eyes again, he can’t stop them.

“I can ride in the back of the truck,” he says. “Just until the next town. I don’t have anything.” He knows how weird his situation appears. He rushes to give an explanation that will win their sympathy. “A couple of guys… we got into a fist fight. A third guy jumped me and they took everything. They left me up the road. I have nothing.” He looks into the eyes of the woman who seems the softest. Her brown hair flows over her shoulders; she wears a dress with a pattern of single feathers. It looks handmade, and her shoes are Mary Janes. “I thought they were going to kill me.”

“Oh my God,” the first woman reacts. “Should we call the Sheriff?”

The water-bottle woman says, to her companions, “We can get him to Montesano. They have to have a Sheriff station. We can at least do that.” She says the last with another encouraging smile for Chuck. Her teeth are very white against the contrast of her complexion.

Chuck realizes these woman are all super hot. It’s like a kick to the face. He has a libido, now, fuck it all, as if he needs one more biological drive to deal with. Sure he has had girlfriends and boyfriends, he’s done the sex thing in myriad arrangements, but did he ever feel… this? This physical longing? This pain he would really like not to be the thing he is feeling?

“That would be so great,” he whimpers.

ACCEPTANCE

He’s got this. He’s got this, Chuck assures himself.

He’s not alone on Earth, for one. Humans are back. He could have more feelings about what that means, but he says, aloud to himself, “What Would Dean Do?” and stuffs those feelings down where they won’t see sunshine.

People weren’t all bad after all. Those women dropped him off at a diner in a town, a small town but better than a road in the middle of the woods, and paid for his meal. They didn’t stick around, but they did wish him well. His stomach is now warm with diner coffee and a full load of nutrients. He orders a piece of pie from a selection.

ANGER

He stabs the pie with his fork. Once. Multiple times, fast, and he growls until it culminates in a stifled rage yell.

Dean. Fucking. Winchester. And. His. Fucking. Pie!!! Just looking at pie makes Chucks vision go red. He feels as though he might black out, he is so furious. Chuck picks up the plate and throws it across the dining room without paying any mind to the shocked faces of patrons and staff. He flings the fork in another direction. He jumps up onto the vinyl seat of the diner booth and bellows as loud as his diaphragm will push the air out of his chest, “AAAAAAAAGHH!!!”

Of course they kick him out of the restaurant. He shoves back but he doesn’t actually fight. No, he can’t fight. He’s a little, weak human now, fuck the Winchesters, and can’t do shit. But he can yell about it! He can rant!

Chuck is losing his goddamn mind. None of this is right. None of this is fair. HOW COULD THEY DO THIS TO HIM?

How can this be reality? How can this be  _ his _ reality? He doesn’t deserve this. No one deserves this! He was going to find them and tear out their throats with his bare hands or die trying!

DENIAL

This wasn’t really happening. Lots of belief systems and philosophies explore the idea that reality is an illusion. Hell, Chuck would reject this reality and insert his own. ( _The Dungeonmaster_ was such a fun movie, he should have ensured a sequel. It deserved a sequel. So did _Krull._ So many great movies in the ‘80s.)

No, Chuck would not accept that this state of things was the way the Winchesters claimed. It has to be a mistake. It’s a mistake. The story can end a dozen ways so this way doesn’t make any sense. It can’t be the real ending.

Obviously, it’s not, because he still exists. He is the reason the universe exists. The universe can’t exist without God! He is just having a really bad case of Imposter Syndrome.

Chuck chews nervously at a hangnail on his thumb. Since storming out of the diner, he’s been sitting at the end of the metal slide in a play park. Cars drive by and he has seen people at a distance. The park itself has been empty.

He doesn’t have anywhere to go. He doesn’t have to go anywhere. He’ll be fine.

He’s cold.

BARGAINING

Chuck likes to write thrillers. He rarely tries for humor. That comes organically from his natural genius. He’s thinking about this because it’s a church that ends up helping him. A few days after losing his Godliness, he’s in a city that has social services and he’s going through the motions of living as an average down-on-his-luck human. He never undid the particulars of Carver Edlund, author, so Chuck has a safety net in his old life. He thinks he might take the pseudonym up again, to put a little distance from the weight of recent events.

When he was living as a writer-for-prophet

(Chuck cracks himself up. See? Organically funny.)

he had tabled his divine nature and abilities. He had gotten so deeply into the role.

He could do that again. Could he? If he did start writing again as a job, as a human job, he thinks he could get himself back to that place. He wasn’t  _ miserable _ as semi-successful author Chuck Shurley. All that day drinking, in character, was kind of fun. It helped him tap his inner Dean. At the time that was important to him.

He doesn’t need Dean or Sam now. He’s lost interest.

He slurps at the coffee in front of him. He cringes at the sour taste of coffee that has cooled down. “Miss?” he calls to the girl behind the counter. He holds up his cup. “Can I get a latte?”

Hard to believe he told Becky, only a short while ago, that he couldn’t write anything else but Winchester stories. Ha! He had been in a bad place that night at her home. The way she had rejected his ending… he had taken glee in writing something he  _ knew _ she would hate. He knew Becky. He knew what she liked in a story; he had seen her fanfic.

_ And  _ it was a damn good ending. So epic, like Hercules rising to Mount Olympus on a burning pyre after his gullible wife poisons him with the venom-soaked shirt. If Sam and Dean had only played their roles! If they had trusted him, what a superior ending he would have given them!

Not like Becky’s ridiculous “domestic” drivel. The day-to-day wasn’t worth notice.

Chuck had to notice mundane things like using the toilet and tying his shoes now. He had no choice. Things like getting up from his table and worrying that someone in the coffee shop would mess with his stuff while he was paying for his latte. Things like the creak in his joints in the morning after waking, indigestion, and the fatigue of not being able to easily fall asleep.

He sits at the table for hours, thinking too many thoughts and wanting to notice maybe one thing at most, to have focus. He plays with a pen and pages through his blank death book. His whole existence is in there, in those unreadable pages.

He becomes self-conscious when the barista comes near. She’s picking up dishware and cleaning the tables, but she glances his way.

“Need more coffee?” she asks.

Chuck fidgets with his cup. “No. I’m jittering,” he laughs. Then it occurs to him that she might tell him to leave, and he doesn’t want to go back out into life yet, so he smiles, full charm, and says, “But I might get something else when you’re not busy. I’m going to keep writing for a while longer.”

“That’s a beautiful blank journal,” she says.

“Actually I’m writing a new novel,” Chuck tells her. He is, isn’t he?

The barista pulls out a chair from the next table and sits down, facing Chuck. “Do you mind if I ask what you’re writing? I write short story and poetry.”

Tell people you’re an author, and they always have to tell you about the book they are writing “someday.” Chuck doesn’t want to get kicked out of the cozy shop, but he doesn’t want to talk about somebody else’s characters.

He gives her the brush off. “I don’t know yet. Still working on the concept.” He can’t stop himself from adding, “But it will be epic. I’m really into worldbuilding.”

“Epic fantasy? Right on.” 

The barista gets up from the chair. After straightening the chair, she takes her collected dishes away and leaves Chuck alone. He is surprised by that. He is still nursing his surprise when she comes back with a partially used legal pad.

“So for me sometimes it helps if the paper isn’t so nice,” she says, setting the lined yellow pad onto his table. She deposits two pens as well, beat up looking ballpoints from the cup by the cash register, no doubt. “Not to be pushy. I’ll leave you to it.” She walks away and disappears into the back. Soon he can hear the sound of water and the tinkling of ceramic plates.

He can’t say what makes him slide his death book to the side and pull the legal pad toward him. There is about a quarter of the paper still on the pad, remnants of the torn pages along the top showing how much the pad has been used. He flips it over and back, frowning at the stained cardboard backing.

_ Rock bottom, _ he thinks.

A snort chokes out of him. That sounds like the title of one of Becky’s fanfics. Because of the classic rock and —

Chuck sits back in his chair, contemplating.

What if he wrote a Becky story?

In Becky’s style?

He could get in her headspace for a while. Making himself write something like Becky would — he can see how cleansing that could be. It would reset his writing chakras or whatever.

He’s smiling when he sets the gummy blue ballpoint pen to the page and begins,

_ The alarm clock rings. The cheery sound cuts into Dean’s dream and pulls him awake. _

Although, Becky was a Sam Girl.

_ Sam is out of the bunker early, jogging in the new morning’s sun. _

SAM

Sam is out of the bunker early, jogging in the new morning’s sun. The day shines clear light on the water along the jogging path. He pauses at the bridge, his eyes squinting against the golden reflection. It is a beautiful day. Early morning light always makes him feel hopeful.

He takes in the world, the boats on the water and the thick growth of lily pads along the bridge, the sounds of singing birds and the distant, happy bark of someone’s dog. He’s sweating in that good way, the satisfying perspiration of a run. He is not running away from anything or running toward anything. He can just run, because running is something his strong body can do.

The golden light makes him think of Cas. He can’t help it, and he doesn’t stop it. Sam feels his feelings. There is frustration and sadness there. There is hope, too, because Sam believes in Jack, and that means he has to trust that Jack wouldn’t leave Cas to the Empty. But they haven’t seen Cas or received any signs from Jack — which is exactly what Jack said he would do, being hands off — so trust is all Sam has. He has always been the one to keep the faith.

The frustration comes from grieving in his way, because even if Cas is in heaven or at peace in some other way, Cas is still gone. Gone forever gone, not gone off on his own gone. It still feels like he could walk into the bunker at any time, stamping down the metal stairs with a weary step but smiling when he sees the Winchesters. Something about his smile made him seem human. It was always like the Winchesters were his relief, clean water after a time of drought. Cas was family in the best sense. Sam didn’t always agree with what Cas did, but he could count on him. Caring for someone and knowing they care for you: that was family.

The frustration came from grieving in his way while Dean grieved in Dean’s way. Because it would help Sam a lot if he could talk about Cas with someone who knew him the same way, as family. They didn't have to talk about the rest, not yet. The sadness came from Sam’s empathy with his brother who was, in Dean’s own words, “still trying to figure out how to even start thinking about it.” Sam saw Dean spacing out a lot. The heavy drinking had eased off, at least, and Dean showed evidence of being in a low-grade depression instead of the scary, destructive depression Dean had been in while they had been fighting the Apocalypse World angels. When they had given Cas a hunter’s funeral, and after.

Eileen had been amazing, supportive in the ways Sam needed it, kicking him in the ass when he started expressing his grief in unhealthy ways. She was currently on a hunting trip with Donna and Stevie. It sounded like Charlie and Stevie were a little bit on the rocks from relationship stress, but Eileen told Sam in her daily text messages that Stevie said they just needed a short break because the stakes had been raised in crisis. The more things returned to normal, the more Stevie and Charlie could find their new normal.

Sam stretches. He is almost done with his run and timing will put him home around when Dean would be stumbling awake. The dog would wake Dean up if he slept in too late. Sam liked to be back from his morning exercise before Dean hit the kitchen, because when Sam stayed out too long, he had seen too much relief in Dean’s eyes once Sam got back to the bunker. Dean needed to wake up in the morning and find his brother home.

Plus if he got home before Dean finished his first mug of coffee, Sam would cook breakfast. That meant veggie bacon. “Meat Man” Dean complained about it loudly that past time, but as sad as it was that Dean hadn’t had enough fight in him, since life had settled down, to protest the lean alternative, Sam suspected that Dean was starting to like facon. Not prefer it, but he would eat it when Sam cooked.

Sam makes it home before eight. He dashes through the shower, towels off and pulls on jeans. Dean’s alarm clock chimes as Sam trots back to his room and pulls on shirts before heading to the kitchen. When he hears Miracle’s feet tapping nails down the hall toward Dean’s room, he puts bread slices into the toaster and pours whisked eggs into the heated pan to cook.

He makes scrambled eggs, in the way Charlie insists is the  _ only _ way. She has been so adamant about it, almost evangelical about the Stevie Method for Perfect Eggs. This is part of Charlie’s dealing with losing Stevie and getting her back. Other hunters have been humoring Charlie because of course they know she needs it. Many of them had gone through a similar shock.

As far as Sam had been able to tell, it is only some hunters who remember anything about the vanishings, and only hunters who had had contact with him and Dean in those last days. Everyone and everything else had been returned to a safe place. Planes in the air flew with passengers undisturbed by anything but light turbulence. Motor vehicles that had crashed without drivers were put back on the road, car and driver whole.

He looks up from the cast iron pan and his thoughts when Dean steps into the kitchen. The toaster pops.

“Hot bread!”

DEAN

He reads the words “Pie Festival,” and it’s like his brain sits up and whines. He’s petting Miracle while scrolling the internet and that is a steady comfort, but the simple beauty of those two words is a promise of  _ something good _ , of a kind of happiness that he has not been able to get to stick around for more than a few moments at a time.

“You got something?” Sam asks.

“Oh yeah,” Dean answers. He turns the laptop around so Sam can read the screen. “Article says it’s not to be missed.”

He’s ready for an argument that doesn’t happen. “Yeah. OK. Let’s go,” says Sam. “You haven’t been out of the bunker in a while and I could stand a couple days on the road for the hell of it.”

Sam is being reasonable and Dean doesn’t rise to the bait. He keeps his feelings deep and his attitude shallow. “Alright! We can drop Miracle off at doggie daycare and hit the trail.”

“You don’t want to take him with?” Sam asks.

“Naw. He’ll have a better time with Max and Caitlin,” Dean says lightly, but he’s already feeling uneasy about the dog being out of sight. “I just hope he doesn’t eat too much unwanted pizza. Cheese ain’t good for his gut.”

“So like you, then,” Sam remarks.

“Bitch.”

“Jerk.”

An easy two days driving to Akron. Four days for the round trip would be a lot for the dog. Dean makes it quick when he leaves Miracle with Max. He’s never gotten over the kid stealing his car, but Lebanon is a small population and the teen is making an effort with her dog walking and daycare business, he has to admire that.

Once Dean is behind the wheel with Sam shotgun, it’s like old times. The Impala’s hum travels all the way to Dean’s bones, fills him up with a sound like his own heartbeat, but nicer actually because it sings in him steady and never turns into a sound like someone trying to break out of his head. Michael is long out of his head and no one knocks him around except in a fight, but still sometimes his pulse gets so loud he expects to see bruises rise up on his meat.

The road and Baby’s engine and music from the speakers smooths out the hours. Sam hardly says a word the whole way, and he doesn’t need to. They choose a motel when they’re past the midpoint to Akron, get up early, and are in the suburbs by midday.

Something about the suburbs and all the families living their apple-pie lives, couples with kids and friends leaning on each other and laughing — it puts Dean in a mood and he throws his whole self into two words. He gets out of the car and takes in the sight of Pie Festival.

“Are you crying?” Sam jokes.

And dammit, he is. Somehow his eyes got wet when he wasn’t minding. “It’s so damn beautiful,” he says, thinking of pie and only pie, and he makes a beeline to the pie ticket line. Sam finds a bench while Dean picks out his 6/$20: pumpkin, lemon meringue, cherry, peach, one called bumbleberry, and — of course — apple.

Sam starts talking about Cas.

If the words to talk about Cas existed, Dean would talk about Cas with Sam, of course he would. No one is closer to Dean than his brother. When Dean had told Sam about what Cas had said, what Cas had done to summon the Empty, Sam had listened like he already knew, because of course he did. But talking about Cas… there weren’t words. Just like there hadn’t been words when he’d stood there dumb and listened to Cas say goodbye, say  _ I love you _ like it was a damned easy thing to do, to make those words move out of a person’s gut and pass his lips.

Cas had done it. Said this truth.

Some day Dean might discover the words, but today wasn’t that day.

Today was for pie.

ANGER

The ballpoint stutters and runs out, leaving part of the last sentence Chuck has written visible only as an indentation on the lined paper. He stops and chews on the back of the pen.

The barista has flipped the sign on the door, and now she is moving chairs and sweeping. When she catches his eye, she tells him the cafe is closed. She says it gently, like a co-conspirator, a brother-in-arms, a fellow writer. She looks nothing like Becky but in the moment she looks like Becky, like when he first met Becky and she was a wild-eyed fangirl writing pornographic nonsense about  _ his _ characters.

Just anyone thought they could be a writer, didn’t they? But none of them, not one of them knew what Chuck knew. They had not seen the very fabric of the universe being woven from the threads of his Will. They had not molded nothingness into complex systems of laws and life. Chuck had invented gravity! Breathing! Vermillion!

First of all, the Winchesters belong to him. He made them. He couldn’t control the flesh-and-blood Winchesters now, but he would write about them the way he wanted to write about them, and as Carver Edlund his word was still the Word of God and the  _ final _ word about Sam and Dean Winchester. Becky and her ilk could scribble their little laundry day stories but those would never be canon.

He tosses the legal pad into the trash can on his way out of the coffee shop.

END


End file.
